Category Archives: Righteous Indignance

We were accepted into The Variety School of Hawaii this past week. Needless to say, it’s been quite a summer. From getting her diagnosis, to applying to The Assets School and then getting referred to The Variety School, it’s been a whirlwind. And here I thought I’d get to relax while she went to camp!

School starts for us next week & as much as I thought she’d fight us on it, because, lets face it, what kid doesn’t love getting to sleep in, she’s really looking forward to it. She’s counting down the days, looking longingly at her pile of supplies on the table that used to be our homeschool table, and talking about what she might do at her new school.

While we’re very excited that she’s going to be in a great place where she’ll fit like a hand in a glove, we’re more than a little concerned about the financial aspect of the whole endeavor. For a child like Aidan on the ASD, tuition is $28,500/year. We were able to get grant-in-aid funds to bring it down to $19,150/year. We’ve enrolled in Tricare-ECHO like good little lemmings. The school is great. They provide individualized instruction, speech therapy, occupational therapy, adapted PE, remediation where needed, enrichment where needed. Really it’s everything she needs. But, because they don’t provide ABA (applied behavior analysis) therapy, & therefore aren’t considered “approved ECHO providers”, ECHO won’t pay one thin dime. Of course.

Excuse me ECHO, I don’t want her behavior modified nor do I want her “cured”. I happen to like her just the way she is. She is incredibly gifted and if this school can remediate her working memory and her processing speed (& maybe as an added bonus, develop a few social skills) her IQ will be off the charts and she can talk to people about what she knows without scaring them off.

So the $64,000 question is this, to whom do I appeal this arbitrary decision? Surely I don’t take the word of a call center functionary? I know there have been instances of ECHO paying for special needs schools. I need to know who to talk to, how to get a hold of them & just how high this Warrior Mama needs to climb to fight. Because believe me, if there’s money out there that can be used to pay for her education, I’ll fight tooth & nail to get to it. Not just to save our family a few measly ducats but damnit because we’ve sacrificed for it and they owe it to us. She wasn’t even 2 when her Daddy went to Iraq, just a baby. He got home in time for her 3rd birthday. Tell me she doesn’t deserve a good education from her Uncle Sam.

There’s a WHOLE lot of hurry up & wait in military life. When Ryan came home & announced that we’re moving to Hawaii, he had only received an RFO from HRC (in English: Request for Orders from Human Resources Command). Once we knew where we were going, my life got shoved into hyper drive. There are a few things that have to happen quickly when you’re PCSing OCONUS (permanent change of station out of the continental United States), especially if you have kids or a pet.

I had to do a lot of research to get all the details on bringing a pet onto the Hawaiian Islands. Long story short, it’s a rabies-free state, pets have to have two rabies shots and a blood test (called the FAVN-OIE Rabies Antibody Test) and then 120 days after the blood test has been sent to either a lab at Kansas State or Ft. Sam Houston, they’ll let your pet on island. If you don’t follow the protocol, your pet has to spend the 120 days in quarantine at the Honolulu Airport…not fun, for you and definitely not good for your poor pet (plus it’s EXTREMELY expensive to quarantine your pet at the airport). It’s much better for your pet to spend the 120 days with you at your mainland home than in a tiny cage at an airport.

If you’re PCSing to Hawaii, here’s the official site with info that I found. Since Abbey is still a puppy, we had to get her second rabies shot. At that vet appointment I found out that we have to wait 21 days after getting a rabies vaccination to do Abbey’s FAVN blood draw. So, for those of you playing along at home, Ryan got his RFO in mid-August, is due to report for duty in early November…that’s less than 120 days already. Even if we’d done the FAVN test the day we got the RFO, her 120 days wouldn’t have been up until December. Now, with the 21 days added on, her 120 days will be up in January. So, Abbey will stay in Colorado with Ryan’s family until her 120-day sentence is served. See what I mean about hurry up and wait?

The other thing you have to hurry up and do? Overseas medical screenings. Aidan and I had to go to the Exceptional Family Member Program Office and get medical screening forms, then get appointments with each of our primary care managers. Luckily, Ft. Huachuca is a small post so it was easy to get into see our PCMs. I can only imagine if we were still at Ft. Sam Houston & trying to get appointments at BAMC! I also had to fill out a questionnaire about each of us, our health, what medications we’re taking, our medical history, etc. and then when I turned them in, the EFMP nurse questioned me about everything. Ryan has to fill out a DA-5888 which is basically the same thing but for the servicemember.

I’ve gotten all of this done in about two weeks. The thing that’s trying my patience? We’re STILL waiting on orders. I’ve done everything I can do without a set of official orders in my hand. Normally, with a CONUS move (a move within the lower 48 states or Continental United States), it’s fairly easy for the transportation office to contact movers, set a date & get things done. With an OCONUS move, things have to boxed AND crated to be shipped overseas (involving two companies or more), our vehicles have to be shipped, his has to be driven to San Diego, mine has to be scheduled with the autotransport company to be picked up here, driven to San Diego or Long Beach, put on a ship to be taken to Honolulu. On top of all that, Ryan has to put in for leave 30 days before the day he wants it to start (which was September 3). He can’t put in for leave without an itinerary. You can’t get an itinerary and plane tickets from the transportation office without…you guessed it…ORDERS!!! So you understand my frustration, right? I can’t even tell potential landlords/real estate agents when we’ll be on island so we can set up showings. Ryan said when they DO finally arrive, HRC can expedite his leave form and speed other things along as well (we shall see). Lets all cross our fingers that the orders come soon.

Nevertheless, we’re still excited about moving to the islands! Aloha!!

Aidan is in first grade, attending a school on a military base. The kids she is going to school with are a rainbow of diversity but it’s no different than any other school she’s ever attended, from the public school the last two years, or the post pre-school at Ft. Benning. Military kids just tend to be a microcosm of the nation…incredibly diverse.

Ryan & I have made a concerted effort, ever since Aidan was old enough to notice that some people have different colored skin, to tell her that God made everyone different, we’re all the same on the inside and the color of our skin doesn’t really matter. I’m pretty sure we’ve been successful. She treats everyone the same, regardless of race.

Her classmates, on the other hand, have not been hearing the same message at home.

Today at recess, Aidan tells me, two of her classmates informed her that unless she had coffee colored skin, she was NOT allowed to play in the sandbox (her favorite place to hang out during recess). My child, apparently has peach skin, and was denied entrance, so she lost it and acted out. The teacher on duty, saw only the action & didn’t hear the interactions so only Aidan got in trouble. Aidan told me she knew she should’ve ignored them or used her words but I can see where she was coming from! Geez louise! First graders banning another first grader because she’s white?

I have to say, I’m nervous about what February & Black History Month might bring. Will this further empower these students’ bad behavior? I prefer to raise my child to be colorblind, that race doesn’t matter, that God made everyone different but everyone the same. I do not want the school to undermine my teaching.

I’m a pretty easy-going person. I haven’t always been. I used to have a 2 millimeter fuse on a 2 megaton bomb but with age, parenthood & medications, I’ve mellowed out. Considerably.

But there are still a few things that make me absolutely, completely, off my rocker, CRAZY. This, my friends is one of them. I present to you, the messy detergent bottle.

SOMEONE, anyone, explain to me HOW on God’s green earth this happens?? The lid is designed to pour the excess back into the bottle, NOT all over the outside the bottle. I can’t even fathom how this happened. I had to spend 10 minutes washing the detergent bottle in the washing machine.

It always seems that I get big news from my best friend, Maria and/or her family (Bonfire falling, Saddam Hussein’s capture, etc). Today’s news of the horrific shooting at Fort Hood was no different. I was driving Aidan and myself to my mom’s house in Houston for a long weekend of shopping and girl stuff and I got a text from her asking if I’d heard anything about what had happened at Hood. Seeing as to how a) I don’t watch the news (military wife and sister self-defense mechanism) and b) I’d been packing and then driving most of the afternoon, the answer was no. I turned the radio over to a news station and started to learn of the situation.

My heart is broken for those murdered and injured. These soldiers know that they’ll be in harm’s way when they deploy but they expect their post to be a safe zone. On top of that, the families were also put in harms way. An Army post in not only where soldiers train and work but it’s also where soldiers’ families live, their children play and go to school. To bring hatred and violence to a place of peace is…well, I can’t think of a word bad enough to describe it. My prayers go out to those families at Fort Hood.

As I was driving, I started thinking back to last year when we were living at Fort Benning. I was working right off post and Aidan was going to preschool on post. Ryan was deployed and then from deployment he went straight to schools so he was gone. I knew NO ONE on post. All of my friends lived off post, worked off post, and their kids went to school off post. I started to think, what if something like this had happened last year? What if post had been locked down like Ft. Hood got locked down today? There would’ve been NO WAY for me to have gotten to Aidan for who knows how long. I found out that the military officials shut down land and cell phone lines at Ft. Hood. What if that had happened at Ft. Benning? I couldn’t have called her school or ANYONE. It made me afraid for the wives and mothers who couldn’t get to their kids today.

Offer up a prayer for our soldiers and their families tonight and everynight…we need it.

I was reading this article on Ohdeedoh about Disney offering a full refund on any Baby Einstein dvd purchased in the last 5 years. If you’re not interested in clicking over, I’ll sum up…apparently a parents group has brought suit against Disney for stating that showing infants Baby Einstein videos would enhance their intellectual development when popular knowledge now states that TV is bad for children before age 2.

First off, how dumb could these parents be that bought into that line? There’s nothing that a child could sit and passively watch that can enhance a baby’s intellectual development. Maybe the parents should’ve been watching it?!? When Aidan was little, I went back to school for my teacher certification and some afternoons I needed quiet time to do homework. I’d pop in Baby Van Gogh, put Aidan in the exersaucer and she’d have a blast watching the puppets and the colors and the artwork and listening to the classical music and I’d get a chance to do my homework. I was in no way naive enough to believe she was learning anything or her development was becoming in anyway enhanced…Mama was just using the boob tube as a cheap babysitter!

Second, I am reminded of a something that happened around that same time. My friend Tanya and I used to take our kids to the Houston Children’s Museum a lot back then. One one of our trips I overheard a Nanny (we often saw Nannies taking their charges to the museum rather than parents) asking the resident pediatrician about the little girl in her care. Apparently the child was about a year old and wasn’t talking yet, just grunting and pointing. The dr. asked the Nanny if the girl watched any TV and the Nanny was very adamant, “No, no TV, her parents don’t allow any TV. I have to put her down to watch Baby Einstein videos.” The doctor’s response was what interested me most, “Those videos are completely passive, there’s no dialogue, virtually no speaking at all. A cartoon would be better than those videos.” Sadly, the Nanny probably couldn’t tell the girl’s parents and they probably spent oodles of money trying to figure out what was “wrong” with their child.

As a voracious reader, a (currently unemployed) schoolteacher and a former Media Specialist (fancy-speak for “school librarian”) I will tell you the one thing that is GUARANTEED to enhance your child’s intellectual development: reading. According to The Children’s Reading Foundation, “Just 20 minutes a day reading aloud with young children strengthens relationships, encourages listening and language skills, promotes attention and curiosity, and establishes a strong reading foundation. These skills are essential for success in school and in life.” The students whose parents take the time to read to them on a daily basis have a larger vocabulary, can follow stories as they are told and retell stories well; they usually have a longer attention span, and, most importantly, in my opinion, they are developing a lifetime love of reading. Additionally, these kids are typically more emotionally secure. Don’t spend your money on “pseudo-educational” toys or videos, buy books or check books out from your local or school library!

Remember that job interview I had a while back, before we left to come to San Antonio? The phone interview went great. The principal seemed really interested and then called me back a week later asking if I was still interested in the position. Sounds good, right? She said that she wanted all the new people to come in and meet with the priest so we scheduled a time for that to happen the day after I got into town. I showed up at the school dressed up, not in a full-on interview suit but dressed up. Dressy capris, heels and a jacket. I thought I was hired, I thought I was meeting the priest. Nope, I was interviewing again with the principal, 2 teachers and (in the priest’s place), the president of the parents’ council. It would’ve been nice if I’d known I was interviewing again so I could’ve worn my suit. Anyway, I was asked all the same questions again that the principal asked me over the phone and I gave the same answers. I thought I was doing good until I accidentally mentioned that Ryan had been deployed to Iraq and my faith got me through the 14 month deployment (I was being asked about how my faith is a part of who I am). I saw the parents’ council lady write “Husband military?” at the top of my resume’. Well you might as well have stuck a fork in me then because it was all over. I left feeling like crap and then got an email on Saturday telling me that I wouldn’t be hired. Yep, we’re military, damn it. My address on my resume’ says Ft. Benning and we moved to friggin’ “Military City USA” and your school is the closest one to the Army post in town. Don’t act shocked to find out an applicant is a military wife. I’m sick and freakin’ tired of being discriminated against because we’re military. Schools need to get it through their thick skulls that there are a lot of military wives that are teachers. It’s a nice, portable career for women who get dragged from pillar to post every 3 years. Grr…I’m really frustrated. I thought I had it all secured until this load of crap got put in my lap.

. . . .

In other news, does anyone know what kind of plant this is?

The color of the flowers didn’t show up well, the flowers are purple. I saw them all over my parents’ neighborhood in landscaping and I just love them and would like to see if they’d grow here. So, any thoughts on what it might be?

I opened UrbanOutfitters.com to look for some cute outfits and apparently traveled back in time about 10-12 years to my college days (maybe I’m just too old for that store now). Please do not tell me the early to mid ’90s “grunge look” is back in style again? I guess the old adage is true, if you remember it the first time it was in style, you shouldn’t wear it the second time it’s in style (my mom told me that when the hippie look came back around in the 80s).

(Photos Deleted)

Granted, all of these tops are considerably more fitted than the sacks that we wore back in the day…dang those shirts were big…two or three of me could have fit in one of those shirts…they’re still ugly and I won’t wear them. Bleah. There’s cute tartan (which I love and would wear with no problem) but buffalo plaid ain’t it.

We’re almost to Texas and I’m so excited I can hardly stand myself. It’s currently noon on Wednesday and we’re sitting in traffic on the east side of Lake Charles, LA, which is why I’m blogging instead of driving 80 mph down I-10 (I mean just under 70, Mr. Louisiana State Police Officer, sir!) Anywoo, I had this whole cute little post idea with a picture of the “Welcome to Texas” sign and the mile sign that tells how far it is to El Paso. BUT, at the rate we’re moving, we may as well just stay on till Christmas.

We had to bring both our vehicles on this trip. Someone believes it to be best for Ryan to report to Ft. Huachuca in early December (so early that he couldn’t come back to Georgia with us). After Thanksgiving with our families, Aidan & I will go I one way & he’ll go the other. Houston is almost equidistant between the two. His next school (in Okla-freakin-homa) doesn’t start until January 11 and get this mess, there’s another school, exactly like the one Ryan’s going to in January…AT OUR POST!!! What kind of crap is that? See here’s the thing that irritates me (ok, is irritating me at the moment, aside from this ridiculous traffic coming between me and my beloved homeland…but I digress) the Army signed a covenant with the families of all the soldiers, promising that it would do whatever it could do to make sure that soldiers & families get to spend max time together because of all the sacrifices we have been asked to make as a result of OIF & OEF and how long those wars have been going on & the long deployments. If Human Resources Command or HRC (probably the entity that cut these cockamamie orders) or the Army (who could change them and make them less cockamamie) gave even one eighths of rat’s patootie about the Army/Family Covenant:

Ryan’s Orders (The Sane Way)
Snowbird with old unit HERE in GA until January 10 (to snowbird: to be temporarily assigned to a unit while you wait for a school)
Attend BOLC II here in GA (see how this works?)
Travel to Ft. Huachuca Mar-Jun

To summarize, I’ve saved the Army money by not having to pay milage & per diem from GA to AZ to OK back to AZ. Saving the Army $ saves the taxpayers $ and shouldn’t that ultimately be the goal considering the the fiscal condition our nation is in? And, if they were to use my new & improved logical (even though Ryan says I’m not supposed to attempt to impart or apply any type of logic to the Army, they just go their own way & do their own thing) they’d be living up to their end of the covenant.

Traffic Update
It is now 1:30 on the dot, exactly an hour and a half has passed since I started this rambling monster of a post and guess what? We’re still not moving! Who chooses the busiest travel day OF THE ENTIRE FREAKING YEAR to do road work?? There’s not even a shoulder or side road to get onto to bypass this mess! Good thing we don’t have celebrate Thanksgiving until tomorrow or we’d be out of luck!
A mile or two back (which at this blinding pace means about 30 minutes ago) we were stopped by 3 or 4 construction workers. If we were moving a three-legged half-blind sloth with in-grown toenails would’ve been going faster than us. Anyway, hard at work, one guy yells at me to “quitcher dadburn textin’, gonna cause a dadburn wreck!” With who, that poor 3-legged sloth who should sue his nail salon? Shut up and do your freakin’ job! Or, better yet, GO HOME so this infernal traffic can clear out.
It has now been 2 hours. Wish I knew just how far we’ve gone. Probably 10-15 miles.

It’s now 1am, and we’re at my mom’s. What is normally 5 hour wound up taking NINE hours. Oh yeah and, I accidentally rear-ended the car in front of me…but not because of blogging! I had actually put my phone away because I had already used up half my battery. Aidan decided that being in her car seat was boring so she got out (she’s in a booster seat now and uses the car seat belt to buckle in so she has more control). I turned around to chew her out and unplug her DVD player as punishment and when I turned back around, the car in front of me had already stopped. Crunch! We were going all of about 2-3 mph. But it still scared Aidan and me. The guy in front of me gets out of his car and starts yelling at me, he was certain I was “texting”. I kept telling him, that my daughter had gotten out of her carseat, and I was trying to get her back in but he didn’t care. My whole body was turned around…I didn’t even have the peripheral vision that I would normally have if I were texting. Sure, I should’ve stopped instead of continuing to roll but I didn’t think about it, I was worried about my 3 year old being out of her seat.

SOOO…we snarled traffic up even further while we waited on the Louisiana State Trooper and Aidan sat in the car crying because she thought the policeman was coming to get her. An HOUR later, he shows up, gets our info, I tell him that I was turned around to get my kid back in her carseat and ran into the car…no excuses, it just flat out happened. And then I asked him if he could give her a talking to for me about staying in her seat and wearing her seat belt. So he has me bring her over. He scared that kid straight, not mean, just stern and real. He told her that little girls who don’t wear their seat belts can get hurt really real badly and all that other stuff…she was scared and a little embarrassed, I think. She got right back in her booster seat and did not touch that seatbelt again.

To top it all off…the officer informs me that the highly efficient and astute state of GA has not yet updated my renewed tags in the system so they’re still showing expired. I offered to show him all my new 2009 stuff but he was generous and took my word for it. I got a ticket for following too closely and I’m sure my car insurance premiums will go up as well. Ugh. The officer also said that the traffic snarl-up was because of a wreck that happened at 5am. The slowness was just a lingering effect.

Lets just say, I’m leaning towards flying home for Christmas. This whole driving cross-country thing is for the birds!

In my previous post about my “accidental collection”, I unknowingly called the green Noritake crystal that goes with my Moon Valley china, glassware. My mother, who picked it out over 35 years ago, corrected me. I was not aware that crystal came in any other color but clear or that it could be a thick as these “glasses” are. Sorry, Mom!

All this reminds me, I ought to photograph my china and show y’all. It’s gorgeous and I love it so much!